Similarly, today (21 June 2018), he revealed some changes and shared a suggestion to improve the quality of higher education in universities, reported The Sun.

Here’s the list of the two changes that you might see in higher education institutions sooner or later:

1. Universities are given the choice to continue or abandon the iCGPA programme

The Integrated Cumulative Grade Point Average Assessment (iCGPA) is a programme introduced by the previous government that doesn’t only evaluate the student’s academic achievement but also their soft skills, general knowledge, good values, leadership qualities and critical thinking. They wanted to create holistic students through the iCGPA grading system!

Hence, to test its effectiveness, iCGPA was piloted at five public universities in September 2015 and by 2017, it was implemented to 334 programmes in 15 community colleges. They hoped that every university in Malaysia will use it by 2019.

However, it looks like that won’t be happening anytime soon because Dr Maszlee said that public universities are given the liberty to either continue or abandon the iCGPA programme. This order is effective immediately!

Reports revealed that this decision was made after a series of consultations and “exchanges of opinion with academicians and students”.Well, who better to ask than the people affected by the system themselves!

Dr Maszlee said,

“Their feedback revealed that the lecturers’ main focus which is to teach has been deviated into conducting research, writing, supervising postgraduates and community service.”

Nevertheless, he stressed that the decision to continue or abandon iCGPA must be agreed by all academic staff and not just the management.

“If the public university wants to stop the programme, access funds from the ceasing of the programmes will be channelled towards university libraries in an effort to enable them to subscribe to quality international journals. This will indirectly encourage more quality research efforts and scientific writing.”

Great move!

2. Lecturers and academicians will no longer participate in bringing in financial resources for universities

To ensure lecturers and academicians are not burdened by trying to bring in revenues for their universities, Dr Maszlee announced that this responsibility must solely be carried out by the universities’ finance department.Yass!

“It is the universities’ financial department main task to increase their revenue and not the academics.”

“Should those appointed to increase the universities’ revenue fail, they should be replaced with someone more qualified to do so.”

True that!

Meanwhile, here’s his one suggestion that should be implemented in our higher education system:

1. Publishers should publish more quality English research books

He has urged publishers to print more quality English research books and market them internationally. Incredible idea!

“It is my hope as Education Minister to see that from this year onwards, the writing of local academicians can be spread across the world and uplift the standing of Malaysian public universities at international level,” he said.

Ambitious but not impossible!

These new initiatives by the Education Ministry are very refreshing and sensible. It’s obvious that our education system is gradually being revolutionised. Hopefully, these new implementations will help us build an internationally competitive and well-recognised education system!